Re: How much mem is low, exactly?

[Thiemo Seufer <ica2_ts@csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de>]

W. Borgert wrote:
> What is the target memory for the lowmem installation?
> 24 MB seems not to work.  I had the hope, that ca. 16 MB
> would be the limit.

25-45 MB, depending on architecture.

> Some ideas for improvements:
> 
> 1. Disable certain downloads/features.  IMHO it is OK to
>    have a lowmem install with less features, e.g. LVM, RAID,
>    other FSs than EXT3/EXT2, etc.  Who would use a 16 MB
>    machine with SW-RAID? :-)
> 
> 2. Let the user select downloads/features.  If the user does
>    have SCSI, SATA, etc. why download the stuff and eat RAM
>    disk space?
> 
> 3. Let the user earlier create the partition table and the
>    swap space (and acitvate the latter) and download other
>    udebs later.
> 
> 4. Use text instead of ncurses for debconf (lowmem is
>    English-only anyway).
> 
> What do the d-i people think?

You may want to read packages/lowmem/README in the SVN repository.
The main reason the "lowmem" mode is so ineffective is that nobody
did so far the work to make it better.


Thiemo